45.1.4. Creating Archives That Retain Security Contexts

You can use either the tar or star utilities to create archives that retain SELinux security contexts. The following example uses star to demonstrate how to create such an archive. You need to use the appropriate -xattr and -H=exustar options to ensure that the extra attributes are captured and that the header for the *.star file is of a type that fully supports xattrs. Refer to the man page for more information about these and other options.

The following example illustrates the creation and extraction of a set of html files and directories. Note that the two directories have different labels. Unimportant parts of the file context have been omitted for printing purposes (indicated by ellipses '...'):

You can now copy the archive to a different directory. In this example, the archive is copied to /tmp. If there is no specific policy to make a derivative temporary type, the default behavior is to acquire the tmp_t type.

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